Georgette Braun: On-stage profanity a big friggin’ deal

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to reflect the correct spelling of Mike Paterson's name.

“Give me an ‘F!’... “F!”

“Give me a ‘U!’... “U!”

“Give me a ‘C!’ ... “C!”

“Give me a ‘K!’ ... “K!”

“What’s that spell?”

When the lead singer from Country Joe & The Fish asked that question on stage five times before the band sang its “Vietnam Song” at the Woodstock music festival in 1969, thousands of concert-goers responded with the F-word each time as part of the war-protest ditty.

You won’t hear that word blasting through stage microphones at the day-long Wing Ding rock concert on May 25 at Rockford Speedway in Loves Park, though.

Well, maybe once. Everybody slips up sometimes.

But organizers have promised to pull the plug if bands belch profanity anywhere near like the rest of us do in everyday conversations.

“We have told everybody that if they use foul language, we will cut their sound off, and they are done,” Jody Deery, owner of the Speedway, told me.

Wing Ding is making its official return to the race track venue this year. Its presenter — WXRX-104.9 FM — held rock and country concerts there in recent years under a different name. Between 13,000 and 17,000 people are expected to attend this year.

Under the Wing Ding banner in previous years, residential neighbors of the Speedway complained about profanity, Deery said.

Loves Park Mayor Darryl Lindberg said neighbors “don’t want to wake up on Sunday to someone screaming the F-word.”

Understandable, given that Woodstock took place on a 600-acre dairy farm in New York, and the Speedway is surrounded by residential and commercial development in the middle of the growing Illinois 173 retail corridor.

Yet it’s much ado about a four-letter word that has become so commonplace it’s mundane in some circles. Take the movies, for example. The F-word is used more than 500 times in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). By comparison, “Scarface” (1983) dropped not even half as many F-bombs — about 200.

Even the Federal Trade Commission let the use of the F-word on live television go without a fine. It was uttered by a Boston Red Sox player last year when referencing the Boston marathon attacks.

By the way, the F-word is used less in conversations to describe engaging in sexual intercourse and more as an exclamation of anger, disappointment and disgust.

The average person swears quite a bit, me included. About 0.7 percent of the words a person uses in the course of a day are swear words, according to “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing.” That may not seem like a lot, but it’s comparable to our use of first-person plural pronouns, such as “we” and “our,” author Melissa Mohr said in a 2013 Time.com story.

Curse words are monitored in songs played by Mid-West Family Broadcasting, which owns WXRX and other local radio stations, including country station 95.3-FM. Mike Paterson, general manager of Mid-West in Rockford, said the country station has played the edited version of Zac Brown Band’s “Toes” to take out a buttocks reference: “I got my toes in the water, ass in the sand.”

Overkill? Even The New York Times, the most popular of the nation’s newspapers, recently has relaxed its policy regarding publishing profanity. If the vulgarity is essential to the reader’s understanding, editors should consider using the term or a close paraphrase, the policy says.

Back in Loves Park, Mayor Lindberg said he expects the radio station and Speedway will have things under control at Wing Ding, and Loves Park police officers will be on-site as well.

Paterson said he’s not overly concerned about bands spewing profanity from their microphones, though he adds that rock bands “need to be edgy and real.” The bands booked for Wing Ding, including headliner Alice in Chains — giants of the early-’90s Seattle grunge scene — “have a certain level of maturity,” he said. “They do not need to go to the lowest common denominator to entertain.”

I’ve attended a few Wing Dings and have enjoyed myself. And I’m a fan of Alice in Chains songs, including “Man in the Box.” Its lyrics include: “I’m the man in the box, buried in my sh*t.”

As you can see, we’re not printing that naughty word here — I’m tempted to say “WTF”? — but I’m betting Alice in Chains won’t get yanked for singing it.